code phrase cher thirty-two

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Yesterday was a long day. I had things holding over in my head to talk about on the tubes, comments, emails, and a bunch of podcasts and lectures I wanted to get through, beside the usual poking about and picking things to mention to you, beside the half an eyeball on the comments yonder, beside the fiddling with images thing and freaking out about all the bugs in this new operating system release and fantasizing that they must have had to fire all the programmers who were Motorola chip aces and hire Intel chip aces... which... uhm... would be people Bill Gates has fired... which may in fact be badges of honor, but, sheesh, still appalling.

I was getting that loopy dropsy feeling at a semi-sane hour and was very near getting in bed when I decided I ought to go back and look at a thread I'd commented on, since it had generated some emails from a dear friend. Well, to my abject horror, I had put this darn cogent comment on the WRONG thread in all my flying about, catching up with the stuff that had held over in my head... and so I think that has to automatically make the comment dippy or even insulting... but I was too loopy and too exasperated, and am leaving it to today to sort out... or maybe just let stand because it might actually apply also on the thread I did post it on... but... sheesh! Mortifying. I have to go back and sort that out once I've had enough coffee, if they haven't managed to delete the comment.

On the one hand, how does this bit differ from me trying to pour the cream for my coffee in the sink instead of my cup, or running out to light a cigarette when there's one lit and sitting in the ashtray already, or making a careful list of all the stuff I have to buy at the store, being extra-careful to make sure that sucker is IN my pocket so it actually gets to the store with me, only to do my shopping without remembering the list is in there until I'm going for my money at the checkout stand? It's, like, normal by now, isn't it?

And how does it differ from the very thing I was at pains to write such a long email about yesterday, a discussion of the economies of attention in a brain determined to strip particulars and skip the mundane in the overriding search for elegance? Isn't that a good excuse? Does it have to be senility? I can plead genius, can't I?

No. Dammit. UNacceptable. I'm trying to help a bunch of smart youngsters get a clue about stuff they have to live another thirty years to get on their own and this just will not do.

We can say I'm helping them fear the advance of senility so much they will be more apt to perform, now, while their cookies have not crumbled yet. Or, best, they caught my request to delete it before too many others had to endure it.

So I got in bed, and put this high vexation out of mind, and began to read myself into the head swimming so deeply I don't know what I'm reading mode, which is the almost dirt certain prelude to actual sleep, and I'm reading about big rifts in the top ranks at Apple and it's seeming to bolster my theories that the bean counters were taking big advantage of Steve Jobs' transcendency while he was busy struggling so hard for his life, and that there are PC-mentality hacks putting out not-good-enough, customer-riling and perfidiously-obtuse excuses for product, and he's not happy about it either.

And then everything went black. Yes. Fade to black.

Then this really upsetting and undeniable urge to pee made me get up in the middle of intense dreaming and trying to note the dreaming's Zen application AS I'm dreaming it... damn bodily necessities... which really changes the character of all that dreaming and tends to wipe the slate... and it then, diving back into bed, relieved, put me in the flipping from dreaming to awake mode, flipping some nine hundred times before I finally realize I am awake and not flipping right back into dreaming.

All that stuck was "Cher 32"... and me having the notion that it was the code phrase demanded of me by somebody trying to tell me things in my sleep.